Rot and Gold 6 – Hardened Bud

The situation was worsening.

Nia was out there taking out synapse creatures, but she was just one person and could not do this faster than the totality of snipers that had been on the rooftop. Ehtra had reinforced Salamander, but the Metracanas they were facing were stalling effectively, tying them down. Nahoa was decimating numbers on the Shadow Island, but there were always more. Rave was giving the people hope, but hope alone was worth nothing.

John was trying to strategize his ways out of this, but the tide of enemies was unrelenting.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t win. Stirwin’s loss of the Celestial Devourer state was already being compensated for. Undine had been withdrawn from the frontlines and the two had combined into Dendepthr. It would take a few minutes for the elemental Pliosaurus to ramp to the strength of the imperfect avatar of chaos. Thankfully, Tiamat’s form had also weakened considerably. Nathalia and Tilgun were holding down the fort well enough.

No, John could win. What was swarming around the place was no threat to him. Even the strongest Synapse creatures around, the Metracanas, could have been no stronger than level 500 to 600.

Could Fusion win? That was the question. John was working as best he could to reduce casualties with his cascading tactics. He was sacrificing one man to save three, over and over again. No matter how well that worked, he would eventually run out of bodies. It was a very real possibility that, by the end of the battle, there would only be small pockets of people left, directly guarded by him and his.

“Should we begin evacuating them to the Palace?” one of the advisors asked.

John shook his head. “That’ll just make this place a bigger target than it already is.” He had not put people in the Palace for the same reason he had not just stuffed everyone behind an I.D. Gate: it was a plan without failsafe. It only took a few civilians that had been corrupted ahead of time to enter with the crowds for that entire situation to turn into a horror. Dispersal over an area was preferable in a situation where protection could not be guaranteed.

The Lorylim had amassed such a gargantuan **** for this **** that John was simply not confident he could exhaust them before most of his forces were ground down.

‘There is one more gamble I can take,’ John contemplated. ‘Is it worth it? I don’t know. Do I have another choice? Only gambles on other uncertainties… It will hate itself more than it will hate us. I’m confident in that much.’ “Chemilia, you have command until I return.”

The sudden announcement caught the other commanders off-guard. There was no immediate threat to their position this time, so they had no idea why he stepped away. He wanted to keep it that way. With long steps, he removed himself from the situation.

‘Are you really sure about that?’ Momo asked. Even while supporting Nathalia, she had enough presence in his mind to know what he had resolved to do.

‘No – but sometimes you just have to bet on the high roll,’ he responded.

‘Can’t you use an Overclock instead? Get some of the others to teleport back?’

‘None come to mind that I can use here without drastically reducing my punching power for the necessary counter attack we must launch. The teleports would isolate the others I sent with them and expose critical infrastructure we just secured. I need something effective against the Lorylim and I need it quick.’

Momo sent something between a mental hug and a worried look. The little moment of intimacy among all of this helped to right his soul. This was worth protecting. For him and for every man, woman and child that could experience such joy.

‘Delicia,’ he called out.

‘On my way. I’m bringing Lorelei and Hailey.’

‘What about Lee?’

‘She’ll be protecting the laser.’

John would have rather had her do something in a less exposed place. Not firing that weapon on cooldown could be a catastrophic tactical loss, however. He accepted that risk for what it was and made his way to Delicia’s laboratory.

Her main workshop was, by now, rubble. Located in the northernmost area of the Industry District, it had been the landing site of an early wave of Lorylim. They had cleaned it out of anything interesting well ahead of time, moving all of that to one of the empty rooms within the Palace.

It was a cramped space, despite the fact that it was enormous. The hasty dumping of all of the shelves, half finished projects, and alchemical tubing used the room given inefficiently. John settled on a table. He did not have to wait for long for the called trio to come in.

“I think this is a terrible idea, for the record,” Delicia stated. “I also think it’s the correct call.”

“Then we are on the same page.” John answered and removed his shirt.

The spot where the primordial Lorylim had infected him was largely unchanged. The texture of the bump had matured into a lighter grey colour and rose slightly from the surrounding skin. Some kind of development was occurring there. A development that he now wanted to accelerate.

Hailey gave the infection a critical look, then lifted her cap to scratch her head. “How do we go about that? Ain’t my area of expertise. Feel like I could’ve stay’d upstairs.”

“Nah, I might need you to do some BS.” Delicia pulled a long, needle-like instrument from one of the crates. It reminded John of a thermometer used to measure the heat inside a piece of meat. “Hold still,” she told him.

John was used to getting stabbed by now. The needle sunk into his flesh, right above the grey patch of fungal matter. Delicia held it there until the instrument beeped. A tiny screen attached to the base offered the alchemist some data. She tapped a button to move through pages, reading it all quickly. Then, she moved the instrument to his shoulder.

“Mhm…” she vocalized her thinking. “Huh? Mhm…” She stabbed the infection itself. The patch did not react at all. John could vaguely sense the needle invading him. It was muted, but the infection was still part of his nervous system. “Alright… so… that is weird… it’s consuming mana at an equal rate that it is giving it back…”

Delicia looked around, found a whiteboard, and brought it to the table. She began sketching things with a marker. By virtue of the instrument used, the drawing looked pretty crude, but the big picture was clear: things went into and out of the knot of Lorylim matter. She changed to a different coloured marker and then drew a bunch of roots around it.

“It’s also consuming nutrients from you. Proteins, primarily. However, by the time they enter into the mass, they have been entirely changed, broken up into amino acids and such… I think it’s trying to sequence your genome and rebuild it into something different.”

That sounded alarming in the first moment, but John realized what it meant in the second one. “It’s trying to build a human body?”

“That’s my read on it.” Delicia tapped the picture a couple of times. “Seems like it is missing something though… Lorelei, could you try to divine what that is?”

“I can attempt to do so,” the seer confirmed. “To tell intent should be resistant to Izha’s meddling…” She placed three fingers on the infection. Eyes hidden by the metal ring she wore at times of challenge, her expression did not change. Only the slowing of her breath to a methodical in and out betrayed her state of meditation. “I see the angel Lucifrena… a yearning for freedom… a respect for power… a frustration to what is missing… realization and aggresio-”

Lorelei pulled her hand back before she could finish the sentence. The hardened bud in John’s side extended, teeth-tipped tendrils of knotted mycelium closing in around where the hand had been a moment ago. They continued to wiggle for a moment before retreating into the mass.

“…I understand what is happening.” John looked at the three women in the room. “It was defeated by Lucifrena. It wants to build a body in her likeness. Looks like it can’t do that off the back of my DNA.”

“That’s easy enough to solve,” Delicia said and looked around. She found a metal basin among her many things, two metres long and one and a half wide. A variety of tools inside it shattered on the ground when they were unceremoniously dumped on the floor. Time was more valuable than lab equipment. “Not exactly a clean tool, but it’ll do… Hailey, Lorelei, I need you two to bleed in that for a bit.”

“…Alright…” The two blonde women were visibly uncomfortable with the direction this was taking. No one in the room was happy with it, but John had elected a course and they were sticking with it now.

It getting a body was what he had wanted. He was betting on the fact that the primordial Lorylim, given the chance to slaughter its kin, would prefer it over hunting down humans. Once the battle was over, he could deal with it. Better to have a temporary ally and isolated enemy than to stay on the current trajectory, that was his calculation.

Delicia wandered to one of the many chests that contained her body of work. Flasks upon flasks of mutagens, each a step towards her goal of making something that permanently and harmlessly could alter the appearance and function of the human body. She uncorked the liquids, pouring them one after the other into the basin. Genetic information within mixed with the blood of the two humans.

Once the basin was filled a finger deep, Delicia switched from mutagens to massive canisters of something else. They looked like the kind of container one would store gasoline in. The scent coming from it was entirely different though. It was a chemical kind of smell, like some kind of solution being hit by direct sunlight.

“I’mma be honest, that looks like the fluid freshly born lambs are covered in,” Hailey stated, after closing her cut wrist with a healing potion. Lorelei did the same a moment later.

John did not have the privilege of having witnessed that procedure in his life, but amniotic fluid was probably an approximation of what Delicia had so swiftly poured together. It was yellowy, with swirls of red inside, thicker than water but not by much, and filled the basin halfway up. He did not look forward to what his next part in this would be.

“Alright… lie in it,” Delicia ordered.

John did not complain. He moved his clothes to his inventory and stepped into the basin. The liquid was lukewarm, which made the affair slightly less appalling. He lowered himself into the liquid. The moment it touched the infection, there was a reaction.

A violent contraction in his lower abdomen sent a painful shock through this nervous system. He was subjected to the alien and thoroughly disgusting sensation of that fungal thing separating from and then sliding out of his flesh. Among the many horrid experiences John had had in his life, it was not even among the top 10, but he still would have rather lived without it. It was like bellowing up an enormous slug from his stomach. At least Gamer’s Body spared him the sensation and sight of having the hole left in him.

John did not need Delicia’s order to get out of the basin. He moved quickly and even then he was still partly grasped by the mycelium that rapidly spread through the solution. He tore his way out of them with little issue. The elementals connected to his mind, following what was happening. If his wager was wrong, he would need them to teleport back immediately. An enormous strategy setback, but he still stood by the decision made.

The four of them stood around the basin, watching the mycelium spread through the entirety of the nutrient soup. It grew up the sides of the basin, then suddenly stopped and retracted. Blind as mushrooms were, it let the parts of it that did not return sustenance die. Then, the effective network at the centre was optimized into the vision of the entity.

Through the clear fluid, John could see every step of the process. The mycelium carpet on the surface consolidated further, until he was looking at a crude imitation of the human form. It was like a grey stick figure made from felted fabric. It did not stay that way for long. Pieces spread out, remade themselves, found themselves in a new arrangement. All the while, the level of the fluid around sank as it was consumed.

‘This isn’t unlike watching Eliana regenerate,’ it occurred to John. Branches of the human nervous systems were recreated. Bones were built from scratch, to be enveloped by blood vessels and flesh. Black bones, grey flesh, white muscle tissue, all of it an imitation but not a copy of the human building blocks. For all of the similarity to the current goddess of genocide, this past one was not the same.

A hand broke through the surface of the soup. Sinews pulled too strongly on finger bones, snapping them at the joints. The wrist circled limply, before suddenly righting itself. The skinless limp fell back into the remaining fluid, to rise again a moment later, this time grasping the air properly.

John clenched and relaxed his left hand. He was entirely prepared to unleash the Arcane Ascension of Purgatory into what came out of this.

The displeasing display of exposed, half-formed, spongy organs transitioned into a proper human body at accelerating speed. Once the basics had been figured out, the entity fused its origins with its new form effortlessly. When it finally covered itself in skin, it did so within three seconds.

The human form of the primordial Lorylim laid in the container and took its first breath, then the second. John observed it closely for several seconds. ‘It or her?’ he considered the question.

What he looked at was unmistakably female. She had mimicked the dimensions of Lucifrena quite well, complete with the medium-sized breasts and the shapely thighs. Male pattern recognition made him see those things, but stress made them little more than markers.

Her skin was a pale grey colour, covered in large part by some kind of black material. Its stringy texture reminded John of the bottom of a mushroom, just dense enough to be an actual textile, covering her like a dress in many parts and swirling over her skin as disrupted patches in others.

She had hair the same colour as her skin. It extended to her chin down the sides and hung all the way to her nose where the bangs fell between the curved horns that sprouted from her forehead. They reminded John of the thorns that the entity had shown in its previous form. They were smooth like polished ivory, transitioning from grey to black towards the tips in a smooth gradient.

The primordial Lorylim continued to lie in the basin, emptily staring ahead. The only thing that moved was the up and down of her chest.

“…Is she braindead?” Delicia asked.

Dark grey eyes in black sclera focused on Delicia in an instant. Round pupils dilated, then narrowed into pinpricks, before expanding back to a normal size. Eyelids twitched. She had a graceful face, set in a melancholic state. Trails of black pigmentation in her skin left the impression she had been crying recently, smearing non-existent makeup. Pitch black lips twitched. Her whole neck suddenly turned 90 degrees. The joint broke, then regenerated, forcing her head back into its natural position.

Clack! Clack! Clack!

The primordial Lorylim opened and shut her mouth repeatedly with senseless ****. Perfect human teeth met like the jaws of a nutcracker. She kicked, hitting the bottom of the metal basin. The plate broke off along the edges. What little remained of the fluid spilled over the blank stone floor.

“Lllllllllllhhhrgh,” she gurgled. She spat out a mouthful of saliva.

“Lyndell,” John said what she was trying to say.

His gamble had paid off, for now.